Agency Outreach Team

Contact Information

Charlie Denton	This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it	928.523.3850
Dennis Lund	This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it	928.523.6639
Dave Brewer	This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it	928.523.3047
Bruce Greco	This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it	928.523.4663

Personnel

Charlie Denton received his education in forest management from the School of Forestry at NAU. He worked as district resource staff on the Coronado, Kaibab and Gila National Forests for ten years before becoming district ranger on the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests, where he worked for 17 years. He has been with the ERI since 2001, and currently serves as a senior program coordinator.

Dennis Lund studied forest management at the University of California Berkeley. He worked over 40 years in Arizona in various positions including forester, district ranger, land exchange coordinator, and staff officer on the Kaibab National Forest for 23 years. He joined the ERI in 2003, and currently serves as a senior program coordinator.

Dave Brewer received his B.S. in resource management, zoology and soil science from the University of Wisconsin- Stevens Point. He worked as a field soil scientist in Shiprock, New Mexico, and in Arizona on the Kaibab National Forest for nearly a decade. He then held the position of district range staff on the Kaibab for ten years and range and watershed program manager on the Kaibab for another decade. Dave joined the ERI team in October 2006 as a program coordinator.

Bruce Greco graduated from the NAU School of Forestry in 1973. He obtained his post-graduate education at Colorado State University and Utah State University. Bruce retired from the U.S. Forest Service in January 2009, after 38 years of service. During that period he worked in California, New Mexico, and Arizona with details to USFS National Headquarters in Washington, DC. Bruce worked as a staff officer at the District and Forest level in Range, Timber, Silviculture, Fire, and Recreation. He also served on Forest Land Management Planning teams, and was district ranger on five ranger districts. Bruce served as U.S. liaison to Canadian and Australian embassies and governments during the wildfire seasons of 2006-2008.

History

The ERI's agency outreach efforts began when ERI Executive Director W. Wallace Covington assigned then ERI staff member, Hiram “Doc” Smith, with the job of agency outreach. Wally gave Doc, who was another former Forest Service employee, the job of acting as a liason between forestry researchers at the ERI and federal agency land managers. The idea was to make research findings easier to digest and more useful to those implementing changes in the field. Charlie joined in December 2000, when requests for information increased, and the ERI's Agency Outreach Team was formed. The Agency Outreach Team members are all Forest Service retirees, who have extensive breadth and depth of experience in developing and implementing resource treatment projects.


Charlie Denton	Dennis Lund	Dave Brewer	Bruce Greco

Services

The Agency Outreach Team helps practitioners in project planning by offering approaches that are based on the best available scientific research and years of practical experience in forestry-related matters. The team reviews and uses both internal (ERI published) and external research materials related to the ecological restoration of southwestern forests. This includes items such as proper methods for thinning overstocked forests, fuels management, restoration of understory plants, and soil management, to mention a few. This research and other related documents are compiled into a Traveling Library. Agency Outreach Team members have compiled this information, which they take to meetings with practitioners so that the research can be easily referred to during consultations and/or distributed. The team strives to help agencies make science-informed decisions using all available materials.

Working with other ERI staff, the team evaluates and condenses important research papers into usable summaries, such as Desired Future Conditions (DFC) Fact Sheets (see below). The team also work with their ERI colleagues to produce ERI Working Papers (see below), which bring together information about restoration topics.

The Agency Outreach Team holds two- to three-day workshops to present information relevant to practitioners. Past workshops have been offered in every national forest in Region 3. These workshops examined topics such as the principles of ecological restoration, recognizing pre-European settlement evidence, and evaluating treatment methods and their effectiveness. About half of the workshop time is spent in a classroom, while the other half is spent looking at and discussing work at project sites and/or demo plots. The team welcomes topic suggestions. For example, they were recently approached with a request to hold a workshop to discuss the northern goshawk guidelines.

Types of Information

The team provides the following information about southwestern ponderosa pine, mixed conifer, pinyon-juniper, and chaparral ecosystems:

Historical and existing conditions and types of treatments and their effects
Soils
Herbaceous vegetation
Overstory
Fire, fire regimes, and prescribed burning
Wildlife
Air quality
Watershed
Social issues
Economic issues
Historical structure and densities, from maps and data
Treatments and effects, from research and actual projects
Prescriptive criteria for treatments

Partial List of Past Projects

Experimental treatment blocks in the Coconino, Gila and Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests, and in Colorado
Goshawk plots in the Kaibab National Forest
Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests: Eager South, Greens Peak (including Natural Resources Working Group project for Eager South)
Gila National Forest: Wahoo, Burro Creek, and Willow Creek Wildland Urban Interface
Kaibab National Forest: Restoration/Goshawk plots on the North Kaibab
Prescott National Forest: Mexican Spotted Owl plots
Lincoln National Forest: Ruidoso and Otero county Wildland Urban Interface groups, Mexican Spotted Owl plots, Bonito project, and Pinyon-juniper treatments
Coronado National Forest: Pinaleno collaborative group
Project reviews for each national forest on which workshops have been held
Coconino National Forest: Greater Flagstaff Forest Partnership projects and Bald Mesa demo site
Cibola-Mountainaire project
State of New Mexico forestry projects
Mescalero Apache Tribe projects
Navajo Nation demo plot
Several pre-settlement demo plots in the Apache-Sitgreaves, Lincoln, Kaibab, Coconino, and Gila National Forests, and on private lands within the Santa Fe and Cibola National Forests